All change at Toro Rosso

Tough gig, driving for Toro Rosso.

You just get good, and then you're unceremoniously dumped to make way for the (maybe) next Vettel. Such has been the fate of Jaime Aluersuari (which is bad news for my continuing Alguersuaras joke) and Sebastien Buemi. Both performed well this year, but not (it would seem) well enough to keep their Red Bull paymasters happy.

So, like Lotus/Renault/Delete-as-applicable, it's all change at Red Ball Jr, as Daniel Ricciardo joins the team along with Jean-Eric Vergne.

Ricciardo we know a bit about, as he was given the chance to have a go in an HRT for 11 races after some fizzy drink money accidentally found it's way into the Spanish team's rather empty wallet. A best result of 18th might not seem that great, but he made his more experienced team mate Liuzzi look pretty shabby, although, to be fair, your average 19 year old in a souped-up Vauxhall Corsa probably could have done that too.

Like Ricciardo, Vergne has had an odd route to F1, his last outing having been Formula Renault 3.5 (Nope.. me neither.) 1 year younger that Ricciardo at just 21, he's got his work cut out to shine against a team mate who has at least driven an F1 car, even if it was a spectacularly crappy one.

We shouldn't be under any illusions though. Toro Rosso are all about finding the next young star for the Red Bull team. Unless you excel, you'll be binned just like Jaime and Seb B.

Good luck chaps. You'll need it.

(Spot of the Blues tonight, courtesy of The Bullet Blues Band's "Sweet Home Chicago".)

Comments

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog